


Absolutely F*%!ing Ridiculous

by fuzzballsheltiepants



Series: A Mewment Like This [6]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Law Student!Andrew, M/M, Mark Rothko, Mention of Rothko's Suicide, Strange Reference to 90s Folk Song, Terrible Googling Decisions, bad texting, mention of previous self harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 13:02:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14853264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuzzballsheltiepants/pseuds/fuzzballsheltiepants
Summary: Neil googles the thing Andrew told him not to.  Confusing texts, more shared meals, and a trip to a museum result.





	Absolutely F*%!ing Ridiculous

**Author's Note:**

> Andrew thinks some about previous self-harm. Neil talks about Mark Rothko (the artist) and his suicide. And, uh, y'all are going to hate me for the end. 
> 
> Please let me know if you think I need to add warnings.

Andrew was pretty certain his venti caramel macchiato was not going to get him through this fucking stupid class.  He could have dragged an entire Starbucks in here with him, and it wouldn’t be enough.  
  
Why this MBE review class was mandatory was beyond him.  They had yet to cover subject matter he didn’t already know and understand.  All it really did was give him a forum to observe his classmates disproving the notion that one had to be smart to get into law school.  
  
Not that he typically hated it quite this much, but he usually went to bed well before one a.m.  At least he wasn’t the only one suffering.  He watched the class filtering in, and half of them looked hung over.  Or still asleep.  
  
His phone buzzed, and he pulled it out since there was still no sign of the professor.  His lips twitched up involuntarily when he saw Neil’s name on the alert.  He tapped it.  
  
_I do actually have pubic hair_  
  
Okay, that had to be the worst autocorrect fail ever.  Before he could respond to mock him, another text came through.  
  
_And leg hair.  I have a normal amount of body hair_  
  
Andrew finally decided no amount of staring at his phone would clarify this.  _Are you having a stroke_  
  
His professor chose that moment to appear and turn on the projector.  Andrew opened his laptop and was pulling up his notes when Neil replied.    
  
_No I’m fine. I can’t really grow decent facial hair though it’s all splotchy_  
  
_jfc Neil wtf is wrong with you I’m in class_  
  
_Right.  Talk later_  
  
Andrew spent the next three hours trying valiantly to pay attention with minimal success.  At least there was no danger of falling asleep at this point.  Trust Neil to be more effective than espresso and sugar at waking him up.  
  
After class he got off the subway one stop early.  He hesitated in front of the cafe for a moment before going in to grab a couple of sandwiches and more coffee.  The day was relatively warm for March, not raining for once, so he didn’t begrudge the couple block walk as much as he might have.  It wasn’t until he pressed the buzzer and heard Neil’s wary voice say, “Yes?” that he realized maybe he should’ve texted first.  
  
“It’s me,” he said, and tamped down the warm feeling that spread through him when Neil buzzed him up immediately.  
  
“What are you doing here?” Neil asked as he let him in, looking at the food Andrew handed him with bemusement.  
  
“Evidently you’re suffering from hypoglycemia,” Andrew said dryly.  “Or perhaps there were hallucinogens in your overripe banana.”  
  
Neil laughed, and there was a note in it Andrew couldn’t decipher.  “I went to the store this morning.”  
  
“Was that before or after you attempted to give me an aneurysm in class?”  
  
“Can someone give an aneurysm to someone else?” Neil asked over his shoulder as he carried the food to his tiny table.  “I thought it was a funky blood vessel.”  
  
Andrew pictured for a moment Aaron’s reaction if he, neurosurgeon-in-training, ever heard an aneurysm described as a “funky blood vessel.”  It made him grin internally.  He might have to use that line, in the unlikely event he ever talked to his brother again.  
  
“Seriously,” Andrew said around a mouthful of balsamic chicken on focaccia.  Maybe he needed to find a less pretentious cafe.  “What the hell was going on this morning?”  
  
Neil gave a falsely casual shrug.  “I googled it.  The ultimate twink thing.  I’m still not sure why anyone’s ultimate fantasy is watching some guy jack off.”  Andrew choked on his sandwich and gulped down the water Neil handed him.  “Then I looked it up on Wikipedia.”  
  
The lightness of his tone was a lie; there was a hardness Andrew was not accustomed to seeing in his eyes.  “You’re pissed.”  
  
“No.”  
  
Andrew scoffed.  “You’re pissed.”  
  
“Well, it’s kind of the gay equivalent of a dumb blonde, right?”  
  
What the fuck was in the Wikipedia entry?  “That’s not what Nicky meant.”  
  
“But it’s what you meant.”  
  
“No.  I was summarizing Nicky, I don’t think of you that way.”  Somehow that was the wrong thing to say; pain rippled through Neil’s eyes before they returned to blue ice.  Andrew gritted his teeth; he had no clue how they had ended up down this rabbit hole.  Well, yes he did; he had told the idiot not to google this in the first place.  “Look, Nicky was referring to your body type.”  
  
“What do you mean, I look ‘boyish’?” he asked, complete with air quotes.  
  
“I mean you’re a few inches taller than me and I probably have at least twenty pounds on you.  You’re narrow.  A lot of gay men find that attractive.”  _Like me_.  “It’s not intended as an insult.”  
  
Neil picked at his sandwich.  The flare of anger was gone, and he seemed oddly rocked in its wake.  Lost and sad and not at all boyish, not with those sharp beautiful planes of his face.  Andrew wanted to touch him, to taste him, to see what made him forget whatever created those shadows in his eyes.  But Neil was not for the likes of him, and he knew that.  
  
“What were your plans for today, before Wikipedia and I ruined them?” he settled for asking.  
  
There, a tiny flicker of a smile.  “I don’t know.  I guess I was going to go for a run in the park, it’s finally warm enough and not raining.”  
  
“What about after?”  Why the fuck was he asking this, he needed to leave this guy alone before he ruined him.  
  
Neil shrugged.  “I was waiting to see what your plans were.  I think you said something about flipping me off.”  
  
He remembered what he had originally written in response to that, and was glad Neil would never know.  “That can be arranged.  I have some chicken I need to do something with before it goes bad.”  
  
“That sounds completely unappealing.  I’ll come by later.”  
  
Andrew bit the inside of his cheek to keep from grinning at the incongruity of the two sentences.  Later.  He could work with later.    
  
*****  
  
Somehow he did actually manage to get some case work done that afternoon before starting on the chicken.  He appreciated the way that cooking gave the illusion of freedom within its inherent restrictions.  That was why he didn’t like baking, the rules were too rigid.  After setting raw cashews soaking he got started with the chopping.    
  
Neil arrived just as the chicken had settled into the mix of onion and spices.  He looked better, somehow.  More settled.  He leaned against the counter to watch.  “Why do we always eat?” he asked.  
  
“It’s a funny thing about mammals,” Andrew replied.  “We need to eat pretty regularly or bad things happen.”  
  
“Smartass.  No, you and me.  It seems like all we do is eat.”  
  
Andrew stirred the chicken.  “What else do you want to do?”  
  
Neil seemed surprised by the question, even though he was the one who had brought it up.  “I don’t know.  Aren’t there like museums or something?”  
  
“Yes, there are like museums or something.”  
  
“Oh, fuck off.”  But there was laughter in his voice.  
  
When Andrew was done using the food processor and began slowly adding the cashew cream into the chicken mixture, he asked, “What kind of museum do you want to go to?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Neil said.  “I’ve never been to one.”  
  
Andrew looked up at him and he was blushing around his scars, fingers tracing the grain of the counter.  “Ever?  Not even in a school trip?”  
  
“I was homeschooled.”  Andrew wondered if Neil had learned this as a child, the way to twist simple words into a braid so intricate there was no such thing as truth left, or if he had been born that way.  Then he thought of the scars on Neil’s face, on his arms and hands, and swallowed down the fury that surged like bile.    
  
Neil was staring at him, and he realized he had paused for too long.  He stirred the chicken and checked the rice then took it off the heat.  “Five minutes,” was all he said.  
  
Before they sat down to eat he grabbed his laptop and pulled up a directory of local museums.  “Pick,” he said, setting it in front of Neil.  He returned with two plates heaped with rice and chicken korma to find Neil staring, jaw dropped, at the computer screen.  “Do I need to shut you off and back on again?” he asked.  
  
“Sorry,” Neil said, grabbing his plate.  “It never occurred to me there were this many.  How the hell do I choose?”    
  
Andrew shoved Sir away from Neil’s food and settled next to him so they could look at the website together.  Neil seemed unmoved by, or possibly unaware of, the light brush of their thighs; Andrew fought to ignore the way his skin tingled and scrolled through the site.  He’d been to a good many of the museums on the list, but there were a few that were new to him.  “Well, I veto the anatomical museum.”  
  
Neil laughed and there was an intriguing darkness to the sound.  He took a bite of his food, then stared down at his plate while he chewed.  “Holy shit,” he said, “this is incredible.  It’s even better than the spaghetti.  Why would you ever go out to eat if you can cook like this?”  
  
“I hardly ever do,” Andrew shrugged.  “It’s cheaper and takes less time to cook.”  
  
“Okay, you know how I said I can make edible food?  Not compared to this.  Jesus.”  He ate a few more bites.  “Never let me cook for you.  Except breakfast, I make good breakfast.”  
  
Andrew raised an eyebrow at him, but Neil didn’t notice.  He wondered if Neil understood the implication of that statement.  If only there was an accidental innuendo museum.  Before he could come up with a good retort, he realized Sir had crept onto the arm of the couch and was successfully mooching tiny pieces of chicken.  “There’s onions in that,” he said, reaching behind Neil to poke his cat in the ass.  Sir tucked his butt in and shifted forward an inch but refused to jump down.  Of course.  
  
“Is that a problem?” Neil asked.  
  
“Yeah,” Andrew said, standing to scoop up the food-crazed asshole before he could make himself sick.  “At least according to the ‘foods not to feed your pet’ website.”  
  
“I’m sorry, Sir,” Neil said, turning so his back was to the cat.  First the plaintive cries started.  Then the Bambi eyes.  The latter were from Neil.  Andrew just shook his head at the pair of them.  
  
In the end, Neil told Andrew to pick his favorite museum.  Andrew refused to tell him where they were going, just to meet him here at the apartment at ten thirty the next morning.  Obviously the idiot had a googling addiction and he didn’t want him to look at the website and learn about it first.  He wanted to see his face when he saw the enormous columned building for the first time, when they walked into the entrance hall and he realized there was floor after floor of art.  From ancient pottery and crude carvings, to famous paintings that graced books and dorm room posters, to the quirky photographs he knew were in one of the temporary exhibits.  All the different ways people had turned their worlds beautiful.  
  
He suspected Neil had known even less beauty in his life than Andrew had, and that was a fucking crime.  
  
*****  
  
The pale sunshine of early spring washed the red tones out of the stone of the museum, leaving it a flat gray.  Neil’s expression as he took in the building was impossible to read.  “Museum of Fine Arts, huh?” he asked after a moment.  “I guess I expected you to pick something strange, like the cryptid museum or something.”  Andrew gave him a flat look that he hoped hid his amusement.  Judging by Neil’s shift into a grin, he failed.  
  
Neil stopped at the statue of the Native American on his horse that graced the lawn in front of the museum.  The man had his head back and arms open in a wordless appeal to an unknown god.  “I know how he feels,” Neil said cryptically, before turning to go up the steps.  
  
They paid—well, Neil paid while Andrew got in free with his student ID—and Neil studied the map.  “They have a Mark Rothko exhibit?”  
  
“Yeah, it’s up here.”  Andrew led the way.  “You like Mark Rothko?”  
  
Neil shrugged.  “I’ve never seen any of his paintings, but one of—uh, someone I used to know was obsessed with music.”  Andrew wondered what he had been going to say.  “I guess it was folk?  Singer and guitar stuff, anyway.  There was a song she played all the time that was about him.  It was really sad, so I googled him once.”  
  
The room was filled with squares of colors, the paintings all so similar and yet so different.  Brilliant, almost technicolor blues and soft greens, blacks and browns and reds and a thousand shades of white.  One of the paintings stood opposite a Rembrandt self-portrait.  The contrast was so different as to be almost ridiculous; the rough ruddy brown and white square of Rothko’s painting compared to the dark, rich, particular technique of the Rembrandt.  Neil read the little tags about both paintings.  “I never understood how this was supposed to be a self-portrait,” Andrew said.  There was another painting in the gallery, of a tiny man standing in a vast red landscape, that made more sense to him.  The last time he had come he had stood before that painting until his feet were tingling.  
  
Neil cocked his head as he looked at it.  “I think I do,” he said softly.  Neil reached up like he was going to touch the painting, but stopped himself.  Absurdly it looked almost like he wanted to comfort it.  Andrew’s own hand twitched, aching to take Neil’s, to lace their fingers and squeeze gently.  He had never had that urge before.  There was something about the understanding in Neil’s eyes as he looked at that painting that he wanted to chase away.  “You know he committed suicide, right?” Neil asked in his normal voice.  
  
“Because he was impotent.”  
  
“That’s not why, but anyway.  This looks kind of like a door, right?  One of those doors with the windows in the top so you can look outside.”  It did; almost like a kindergarten painting of a door but just a hair too perfect, too precisely rendered for that.  “But the outside is just—blank.  Just empty.  There’s nothing out there for him.”  
  
Andrew looked back at the painting, recognition twisting in his chest like an old familiar pain.  “Is this you?”  
  
“No.  Not anymore.”  
  
They ended up in front of that one painting that had drawn Andrew in the last time.  He still felt the tug of it.  “Why did he do it, then?” he asked.  
  
“He was already dying, did you know that?”  Andrew shook his head.  “Yeah, he’d been sick for a while.  He was too weak to paint anymore, at least not like this.  He’d had to hire people to finish his paintings.  His wife had left him a couple of years earlier, and I think maybe he didn’t talk to his kids anymore either.  I guess he just felt there was nothing left.  Nobody knows for sure, he didn’t leave a note or anything.”  
  
Andrew remembered the bite of a blade in his own skin, the relief as the blood had welled.  He’d often wondered what would have happened if he’d gone just a little too deeply, if he would just drift away on a sea of red.  Something had always stayed his hand; he still didn’t know what it had been.  He’d stopped altogether once he learned of Aaron’s existence.  Nicky romanticized it, of course, turned it into some twin thing, but that was bullshit.  Even once he’d lived with Aaron and Tilda, he’d still been just as alone.  
  
“Is this you?” Neil asked, interrupting his thoughts.  He realized he’d been looking at the painting the same way Neil had looked at the other one.  
  
Was it?  That overwhelming sense of fury-tinged grief that had swamped him the first time he’d seen it threatened to rise again.  Grief for the boy that he had been, though, not for who he had become.  “Not anymore.”  
  
They spent the rest of the day puttering through the museum and only saw about a third of it.  Neil lost himself in the ancient art wing, drifting from Mesoamerican pottery to Greek and Roman statuary to Chinese jade.  It had never been Andrew’s favorite part of the museum, but it was interesting to see what drew Neil’s attention.  
  
At lunch in the cafe, Neil asked him why this was his favorite museum.  He couldn’t quite hide his laugh at the question.  “What, you mean a gay lawyer at an art museum is a surprise?”  
  
“I didn’t picture you as one to fulfill stereotypes.”  
  
Andrew thought about the question, about what drew him back again and again.  “Feeling,” he finally answered.  
  
“Feeling what?”  
  
Andrew just shrugged.  He couldn’t explain it.  When they went up to the photography exhibit, he found Neil looking at him as much as the art.  
  
It was close to closing time at the museum when they left.  Neil blinked at the darkening sky.  “Shit, I forgot I have trivia night again.  Ugh, I’m so tired.”  
  
Andrew realized with an unpleasant jolt that he’d been taking it for granted that Neil would be coming back to his apartment for dinner.  He wondered how he’d allowed himself that hope.  “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”  
  
“No, it’s okay.  Maybe there will be some art questions or something.”  
  
“Okay.”  They walked towards the subway together, arms almost brushing.  
  
“Thank you for this, by the way.  I loved the Mark Rothko thing.  Though it’s funny, I don’t really like any of the paintings, I just loved the exhibit.”  
  
“I think I know what you mean.”  He did, too, even if he couldn’t put it into words.  
  
“What are you doing this week?” Neil asked as they went down the stairs.  
  
“This week is going to be hell.  I probably won’t have any time.”  
  
“Oh.”  Andrew tried not to feel gratified by Neil’s obvious disappointment.  “Okay, maybe next weekend then?”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
“I’ll text you.  Or will you just ignore my texts like you’ve been ignoring whoever’s been texting all day?”  
  
Andrew snorted.  “That asshole deserves to be ignored.”  
  
“Nicky?”  
  
“No, actually.  He’d just call if I ignored more than two of his texts.”  
  
“Are we going to tell him?  That we’re…friends?”  There was a look in Neil’s eyes that, if he had been anyone else, would’ve had Andrew kissing him right there on the train.  He dug his nails into his palms instead.  
  
“Do you want to?”  
  
Neil shrugged.  “I feel kind of bad.”  
  
Andrew snorted.  “Don’t feel bad, he never should’ve put you in that position.”  
  
“I guess.  Besides, it could be kind of fun to see how long it takes him to figure it out.”  
  
Once they had parted, Andrew pulled out his phone.  Five texts from Chris today, to add to the three from the day before, and two more before that.  Bastard never really got the hint.  It was why Andrew usually preferred Roland, who just accepted whenever Andrew showed up.  But there were advantages to Chris too.  
  
_8_   Andrew texted  
  
_Where_  
  
_Your place_  
  
_ok_  
  
Maybe this will help, Andrew thought.  He needed to get Neil out of his head.  There was too much there, too much beauty, too much electricity.  Too much history of pain, too much risk of a future of it, too.  Andrew could never have that, would never be able to hold it, not when there were so many cracks in himself.  
  
_Maybe this will help_.

**Author's Note:**

> The painting Neil was drawn to is [here](http://www.artfixdaily.com/artwire/release/231-an-immersive-display-of-11-masterpieces-by-mark-rothko-at-mfa-bost)
> 
> The painting Andrew was drawn to is [here](http://moca.virtual.museum/abril/markrothko.jpg)
> 
> The song Neil mentions is The Mark Rothko song by Dar Williams. You can listen [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ME9pXJANfY)
> 
> Thank you guys so much for all the comments, they're amazing!


End file.
